In the last year of his life, when most people tend to succumb to comforting illusions, John Weightman, who has died of cancer aged 88, wrote his lucid and devastating analysis, Reading The Bible In The Run-up To Death, dismissing the text's main character as "that unpleasant person, God". It was absolutely characteristic of this fearless humanist thinker, who referred to himself as an absurdist. It was also characteristic in that it was inspired not by an English text, but by a recently published new French translation: as well as being an outstanding writer and critic, Weightman was a French scholar of distinction, and had a lifelong involvement in both cultures.

Reading The Bible (Weech Publishing, 2003) shows the same precise analysis of the text and the same wry humour as that which propelled him to fame as a star book reviewer for the Observer in the 1950s and 60s and made him an internationally admired essayist to the end of his days. He wrote extensively for Encounter in its heyday, the Sunday Telegraph, the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, the Spectator, Twentieth Century, the Hudson Review and other journals. In recent years, he wrote almost exclusively for the New York Review of Books.

Weightman was a descriptive critic: he condemned or praised books out of their own mouths; his comments were always based on the text he was reviewing, so the reader had the opportunity to agree or disagree with him. Thus in the case of the Bible, he showed the absurdity, the divine murderous unscrupulousness, the moral insanity that is its hallmark, simply by reporting on it.

The son of a Northumbrian miner, Weightman fell in love with the French language at the age of 11, thanks to an inspiring teacher at Hexham grammar school. Turning down the chance of a place at Oxford or Cambridge, he went on to the King's College, Newcastle (then part of Durham University), where he got a first in French in 1936 and met his wife Doreen - thereby solving, as he noted in Memoirs Of A Language Freak (2004), one of the most difficult problems of existence early in life.

They were married in 1940 and lived in loving harmony for 45 years, collaborating on translations of many French books, including the major works of Claude Lévi-Strauss. After her death he referred to himself as posthumous.

From 1936 to 1939, Weightman perfected his French at Poitiers University. During the second world war, he worked in the French section of the BBC World Service, chairing discussions between French and British thinkers, including Bertrand Russell. Weightman was the only Briton to broadcast on the news programme The French Speak To The French, which broadcast hope and coded messages to occupied France: on many occasions he read the news while General Charles de Gaulle sat opposite him, waiting to address his people, but they never exchanged words.

After the war, Weightman spent long periods in Paris for the BBC, until in 1950 he began to teach at the University of London, rising to professor of French (1963-78) and head of department at Westfield College, while continuing to write and broadcast in Britain and abroad. Much as he was honoured by French scholars and intellectuals (the French government made him Commandeur dans L'Ordre des Palmes Académiques), he brought peculiarly British pragmatism to his trenchant criticism of French intellectual fashions and their prophets such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

In a 1998 essay in the US magazine Twentieth Century - and particularly influential there - he championed the much abused and much needed Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, which was a follow-up to a parody written by Sokal that had been published unwittingly by the journal Social Text and had exposed the lack of understanding some French academic theorists had of the mathematics and science they were bringing to the study of literature.

All his life, Weightman had a fruitful passion for language and the meaning of words. The Cat Sat On The Mat (Language And The Absurd, 2002) and his two other books are about the mystery of language. Reversing René Descartes' dictum, he argued "I am, therefore I think."

He was motivated throughout by, as he put it, receptive curiosity. When age made it difficult for him to move about, he learned Russian to amuse himself, and with the language he picked up an extensive knowledge of Russian affairs. In the 20 years I knew him, I never met him without learning something important. Even once his own condition had become hopeless, he discussed with animated curiosity the latest turns of the language. It dismayed him that some young people did not possess - and far less saw the point of - dictionaries: he considered the enlarging of our vocabularies as the only way to extend the boundaries and depth of our thinking.

It is to be hoped that news of his death will prompt more people to read his books.

He is survived by his son Gavin and his daughter Jane.

· John George Weightman, academic and writer, born November 29 1915; died August 14 2004